MicroPython Forum (Archive)

Hi, im an electronic engineer, i've programmed arduino and pic, im wanting to start with an esp32 module i recently got, i've been using pycharm with python 3 and i'm currently sruggling with:
- Flashing the device with the firmware
- Finding the path of the device in language and frameworks
- Uploading the code (i don't get the 'flash' opition)

Windows 10
Pycharm
ESP-32
Python 3.5

Hey,
I also tried to MicroPython Pycharm extension and it was quite buggy (and seemingly isn't updated anymore).
Instead, you could give PyMakr for Visual Studio Code a try. In my experience, it worked flawlessly, and has cool features like file sync (so you only copy over what you changed).

It feels like the IDE integrations are just fraught with minor issues that just end up confusing new users. Perhaps there's a silent majority of users who aren't seeing issues but we certainly see a lot of questions in the forum along these lines. It's not a particularly easy problem to solve, and not all the concepts map neatly to existing IDE workflows or terminology like "build" or "flash" (are you uploading firmware to flash, or are you writing Python files to the device filesystem which happens to be on flash).

I wish that the core team had more time to build official tools.

That said (and I say this with a bit of hesitation because it isn't very helpful), it might be worth starting with the "basic" tools to learn the concepts and then work up to the IDE tools when you're looking to streamline your workflow.

So:
- To flash firmware, follow the instructions at http://micropython.org/download#esp32 (note that you can get esptool.py from pip/pypi these days, like any other Python package). This is really no different to any other development board where you need to use vendor tools to flash firmware.
- To access the serial console, use either miniterm.py (which you can install with pip by installing the pyserial package), or with PuTTY. (Again, this is pretty similar to any other board with a UART)
- To access the device filesystem and copy files, use pyboard.py (http://docs.micropython.org/en/latest/r ... rd.py.html) or rshell (https://github.com/dhylands/rshell).

The other option (once you've done the first step to flash firmware) is to take a look at https://codewith.mu/. It's very basic, but it's designed for one single purpose -- writing MicroPython. It has a serial console and a way to browse and work with the filesystem, and to upload code. (Note you need to select the ESP32 mode).

Personally I use pycharm with the micropython addon to have some code completion for micropython libraries. Other than that I rely on external tools and scripts for flashing, uploading and accessing the device. So I'm actually just happy to have a good IDE where I can program. Therefore I don't have many problems.